With one hotel slated for upper King Street and two even farther north up Meeting Street, supporters said the proposed projects, which have a combined 367 rooms, would bring much-needed foot traffic into areas of the city that are in the middle of a revitalization process.

In less than a month since its creation, the task force leading the charge on slowing the expansion of hotel development in Charleston pitched an ordinance change that would give the city's Board of Zoning Appeals more teeth when faced with developers who stray from approved plans.

Crowd-sourced review site Yelp recently started using its data to track the economy, and, according to its analysis for the first quarter of 2019, Charleston ranked No. 1 for growth out of the 50 metro areas it measures.

Other metrics, like hotel room nights sold, also reached new heights in 2018, according to figures from the College of Charleston, but some measures, like attraction attendance and hotel occupancy, went down for the first time in several years.